Attribution Flashcards
Why are causal attributions made
To explain a phenomenon, often incorrectly
Self-serving attributional bias
Success due to personal characteristics, failures due to situational
What are 3 conditions explanatory style is based on
- internal vs external
- Stable vs unstable
- global vs specific
Factors of low self-esteem
External, unstable, specific conditions
Factors of high self esteem
Internal, stable, global conditions
What is the drawback of too much optimism?
Not learning from mistakes
What is the consequence of too much pessimism?
depression
Dispositional attributions
Association of someone’s actions to their personality
Situational attributions
Association of someone’s actions to situational/external factors
Correspondence bias
Tendency to ignore powerful proof that someone’s behaviour was situationally caused
Fundamental attribution error
General tendency to attribute others behaviours to disposition
How does knowledge of actor influence FAE?
Better you know someone, more you can tell when they act out of character and relate it to situation
Perpetual salience as actor
Information captures attention from situation, influences how we act
Perceptual salience as observer
Salient information is actor and their disposition
2 factor theory of emotion
Physiological arousal and interpretation of arousal/situation
Social perceptions
Processes by which people come to understand one another.
Mind perception
Attributing human-like mental states to other objects (animate/inanimate)
Non-verbal behaviour
Reveals feelings through facial expressions, body language, vocal cues
Personal attributions
Attribution to internal characteristics (i.e. ability, mood)
Situational attribution
Attribution of factors external to actor
Covariation principle
Attributing behaviour to factors present when behaviour occurs and absent when not occurring
Counterfactual thinking
Imagine alternative outcomes/events that could have happened but didn’t
Impression formation
Integrating information about person to form coherent impression
Information integration theory
Impression based on perceiver dispositions + weighted average of target’s traits
Priming
Recently used/perceived concepts come to mind more easily -> influence interpretation of new information
Central trait
Traits that exert powerful influence on overall impressions
Primacy effect
Words/topics given first are better remembered
Belief preservation
Tendency to maintain beliefs, even after they’ve been discredited
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Expectations of self/others will lead to expected behaviours/outcomes
Availability heuristic
Estimate likelihood of event based on how easily examples of it come to mind
Base-rate fallacy
Relative insensitive to consensus information presented in form of numerical base rates
